Wesley responded with, “Do u no a Millie?”
Martin thought a moment and then replied, “No.”
When his computer finished booting up, he searched the corporate directory for a Millie or Millicent in the building. There were none. It occurred to him that he should search for former employees as well. Martin deselected “Active employees only” and searched again. There was one result, Millicent Able. She had worked in the Design Department until last month. He didn’t know her or anyone in the Design Department for that matter. Why anyone put her name on the cryptic message was beyond him. He decided that it had nothing to do with her and began combing his email for the latest crisis.
☼
Martin went to the food court as usual for lunch. He was half-heartedly eating his burger and idly wondering how terrifying it must be living somewhere there might be a bomb in the baby carriage at the next table, when Wesley arrived.
Wesley said, “Dude, I can’t wait to see if you get another message tomorrow,” as he sat opposite Martin. “What do you think the next one might be? Something like: ‘Need Milk, Mom!’” He laughed and began unwrapping his lunch.
Martin eyed him with suspicion, “You’re not doing this are you? Because if you are, I wish you’d let me in on the joke. I don’t get it.”
“Why, you know practical jokes are not my style,” Wesley replied in a genteel southern drawl. Imitating some cartoon character or other, he added, “You should report this to secur-i-tie.” Then, with the intensity of an action movie promo, “Millie might be dangerous.”
Martin considered that and then replied, “No, I don’t want to bother with that. Not yet anyway. I’m sure that would cause an avalanche of red tape.” Martin believed red tape had caused the mass extinction at the end of Cretaceous period and not meteorites. “So far, the messages are mysterious but harmless. So, unless it turns into something more menacing, I’ll try not to react and maybe whoever is doing it will get bored and move on.”
Wesley just grunted because he had a face full of falafel.
After pulling a pickle off his sandwich that had somehow escaped his earlier inspection, Martin said, “I looked to see if any Millies worked in the office.”
Wesley swallowed and asked, “Did you find any?”
“Just one, Millicent Able.”
Wesley choked on his strawberry and banana smoothie. “Millicent Able?”
“Yeah, but she doesn't work for the company any more. If you know her, why didn't you say something before?” Martin asked.
In an uncharacteristically sober tone, Wesley said, “Because she’s dead.”
Martin fixed a stare on Wesley. “That's not funny,” he said.
“I'm not kidding. Millicent Able was the girl that they found dead in her cubicle last month,” he replied. “The story goes that she was working the weekend alone to meet a pointless deadline and choked to death on a chunk of cheese. You're really tuned out if you didn't hear that one.”
“Well I did take a week off last month, but damn, that's tragic,” Martin said as he finished off the last of his french fries. “Why would anyone want me to think I was getting messages from a dead girl?”
“Beats me, dude,” said Wesley as he went back to devouring his falafel.
Martin snorkeled the last of the Diet Coke off the bottom of his cup. “Maybe if I find out more about her, it will help me figure out who might be doing this.”
“Blimey, if it ain't Sherlock Holmes?” smirked Wesley, in a cockney brogue. “Alice used to work with her in Design. Maybe she knew her.”
“When you're done, let's go see if we can find Alice,” said Martin, beginning to feel the thrill of the chase.
“Come Watson, the game is afoot!” Wesley added in his best British accent.
Alice reminded Martin of his High School American Lit teacher. She always wore a sweater around her shoulders. Her reading glasses hung from her neck on a delicate silver chain when they weren't propped on the end of her nose. Every time he saw her, he felt a twinge of guilt over never having finished Moby Dick. Martin and Wesley stood at the entrance of her cubicle like they were awaiting an audience with the Queen Mum.
Eventually, Alice looked up from her computer and asked, “And what can I do for you young gentleman?” Martin’s American Lit teacher never began a sentence with “and.”
“Ma'am uh,” Martin couldn’t help himself. He always called her ma’am. “Do you know um, did you know Millicent Able?”
Alice dropped her eyes and said sadly, “Yes I did, the poor dear, but not very well. And why would two fine young men such as yourselves be inquiring about dearly departed Millie?”
Martin replied awkwardly, “Well ma'am, um we...”
Wesley cleared his throat.
“That is, I was just wondering what you know about her, uh knew about her, uh...”
Alice sighed. “Not much I'm afraid. I don't think anyone did. She rather kept to herself.” With a slight gleam in her eye she added, “I know she fancied you, Martin.”
Confused, Martin replied, “What? Me? You're kidding.”
Alice was ever so gently amused, “I would never make light of the dead, Martin. No one ever came to collect her things, so you might be able to learn something by looking through her belongings if you're not afraid of ghosts. Her cubicle is by the window under column R12. Now run along boys.” Their audience was over. It did not occur to Martin until much later that if Alice were as proper as she seemed, she never would have suggested they rummage through Millie's stuff.
Their lunch hour was over, and Martin wasn’t going to go near Millie's desk when other people were around anyway. Someone would think him a creep if they saw him picking through a dead girl’s stuff like a vulture. So they went back to work. Martin decided to stay late that night. He would take the opportunity to get ahead on a few things and then do a little recon unseen.
☼
The clock crept through the afternoon as Martin half-heartedly worked his way through the online, yearly, required diversity training. It was same as last year. He skimmed it and took the test at the end. He hit the button to post the score and held his breath. If it failed to post, as these things often did, he would have to go through it again. But it worked the first time.
He took off his headphones and stood to stretch. When he did, he heard a larger than usual group of people around the coffee machine. The conversation had a grim tone, not the usual jocular debate over whose team was going to kick whose butt in the next big game. He wondered what was going on. It would be awkward if he asked them since he normally avoided the coffee klatch. Martin awkwardly avoided awkwardness. He stood and stretched, trying to pretend he didn’t notice them. He listened.
There was a major change in the company in the news. To avoid further exposure to possible awkwardness, he sat down and consulted the Internet news feeds. He found articles announcing that another company was acquiring his company, Sandstone Global Incorporated. The deal had not been officially announced and would still be pending approvals etcetera, but the news services took it for granted that it was a done deal. Great, he thought, something else to worry about. Between the worry and the anticipation, the rest of the afternoon almost slowed to a complete halt.
☼
Eventually though, it was the magic hour of seven o'clock. At seven the majority of the overhead lights automatically went out, and the air-conditioner quit running. He had never noticed how loud the white noise from the air-conditioner was until it stopped. It had been a while since anyone had come to worship at the Dais of Digital Duplication. In petulant boredom it had gone to sleep at least 20 minutes ago. With much clanking of pots and slamming of drawers, the coffee station had been cleaned and prepared for the next day’s brewing shortly after five o’clock. He sat for a moment and just enjoyed the quiet. Tension flowed from him. It was like finally getting out of that scratchy wool sweater his mom made him wear to Grandma's on Christmas day because Gran had given it to him on his
birthday. He listened for the sound of anyone else working. He could have heard a fly fart. He didn't.
Martin casually made his way toward R12 by the dim light that remained, stopping here and there to listen for anyone else working late. He made a complete orbit around the place where Millie had breathed her last breath to check the adjacent cubicles for silent residents and to note the approaches.
With his perimeter check complete and satisfied that there was no one around, Martin entered the late Millicent Able's cubicle. He expected to get an eerie feeling, but he didn't. Instead, he sensed or perhaps imagined, a warm breeze, and he would have sworn he smelled a shy perfume.
It was too dark in the cubicle to see anything, so Martin turned on one of the lights under a bookshelf attached to the cubicle wall above the desk. The cubicle was empty except for the computer that he assumed was waiting for the next occupant and a box that sat in the standard issue chair. “Millicent Able” had been scrawled on the top of the printer paper box in black felt tip. He hesitated and then opened the box, trying to not make much noise.
Inside the box he found the usual attendance award plaques and coffee cups. There was also a book on Yoga you could do at your desk, Lisa Randall’s book Knocking of Heavens Door, an origami swan, and two exquisite abstract sculptures. The one done in delicately carved marble reminded Martin of standing on the balcony of his mom's condo in Florida watching the summer breezes blowing through the palm trees. The other consisted of welded brass and iron machine parts. It reminded him of the forest-devouring machines in FernGully and Avatar. Both of them had the initials MA on the bottom.
At the bottom of the box he found an over-flashed picture of a girl he supposed was Millie. In the photo she sat at what might be this desk with a small party hat on, her face a shy smile. She held a paper plate with a piece of cake on it. For some reason, Martin felt compelled to keep the picture. No one had claimed her stuff anyway. He slipped the picture into his pocket. He had a dead girl's picture in his pocket. Martin was a little worried that it didn't feel creepy.
He figured he had better get going before he got busted, so he put the lid back on the box, turned off the light, and checked the aisle. Martin felt a touch of disconnected discouragement as he left Millie’s cubicle and made his way back to his desk. He wasn’t sure why he would be disappointed. Maybe he had subconsciously hoped he would find “Millie loves Martin” scrawled in her journal or some other such nonsense.
He went back to his desk, shut down his computer, and headed for home. As he unwound the path he took to get to The World's Worst Cubicle every morning, he had the niggling suspicion that something he saw should be a clue. He figured he was just tired and that maybe a good night's sleep would bring clarity. He didn’t get it.
Martin’s dream began on a beach right out of Lost. The ocean breeze rustled the palms, and the surf hissed. He was walking along the shore looking for… something. Dreams were vague that way. At least Martin’s were. As he rounded a point he saw, up the beach, a large structure. It was a warehouse sized chaotic bird’s nest of skewed marble columns, and a mad mess of pipes. At one edge there was a towering crane (the machine) shaped like a crane’s neck and head (the bird), its beak a giant iron clamshell bucket. The boom boomed as it swung out over the edge of the jungle. The bucket bucked when the boom stopped. His dreams were also frequently full of puns.
The metal jaws dropped on a group of palms that were swaying in the sea breeze, chomped down on them, and then pulled them up out of the sand. The boom boomed once more as it swung around and dropped the uprooted trees into the nest. The crane winked at him and in a rusty voice said, “Shh… It’s gonna be awesome.” Within seconds of the tree disappearing into the nest, a small door opened at the bottom, and a plastic lawn ornament flamingo walked out.
On the edge of nest opposite the crane, rose a spire of twisted metal topped with a crow’s nest. More puns. On top of the crow’s nest sat a girl in a birthday hat eating a piece of cake from a small paper plate. Martin wanted to talk to the girl, so he began to climb up the side. As he climbed he could hear the girl softly singing The Beatles’ Blackbird between bites of the cake.
“…All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.”
He kept climbing but never seemed to get any closer. When he looked down and saw nothing but the tops of clouds, he lost his grip and fell into his bed.
Martin was always skeptical when people told him about their prophetic dreams. He figured it was just their way of expressing some fantasy they didn’t want to admit to. After all, they couldn’t be held responsible for their crazy dreams, could they? He did not remember ever having a dream so obviously connected to something happening to him. Thinking about it kept him awake until the wee hours.
5
Generally you don't see that kind of behavior in a major appliance.
—From Ghostbusters, 1984
Patience not being one of her virtues, she fast-forwarded to sunrise and waited for Martin to appear. Two auras she did not recognize came down the aisle by her cubicle, carrying a large flat plane between them. She ignored them until they turned the corner and placed the object in front of the window, blocking the sun. At once, the flow ceased. That got her attention. She watched them; hoping that they’d put it down temporarily, but then they left the building. They were only the delivery guys. Ugh! Just when you thought being dead was the worst thing that could happen to you, first the box and now the window, what next? She didn’t want to think about it. She’d brooded over what was next too much already.
Martin came down the main aisle and entered his cube. His aura rippled. He had seen the message. Of course he didn’t just run over to her cubicle and move the box. But she could tell that the message at least intrigued him and possibly more than that. More messages were necessary, but how to deliver them without her great power outlet in the sky?
She sat and brooded while Martin went about his day. She hated being powerless. Pun intended. She wondered if somewhere, someone pulled the strings and made all this happen to force little old Millie into a decision. Stinkin’ thinkin’ is what her mom called dwelling on negative possibilities. Enough of that.
She let her mind wander down memory lane. Her memories were so much clearer, perfectly complete, and easier to access than when she lived, a high-definition, on-demand, streaming queue of Millie’s greatest and worst moments. The memory she chose first was opening a fresh package of art markers, the scent of them, and the feel of the crisp tips on fine paper. She remembered learning to weld, the white-hot flame melting metal, the smell of burning flux, and the mess she made when she first started. She recalled, in perfect detail, curling up with her cat and a book on a particular rainy Sunday afternoon.
That’s when it hit her. There were a lot of her personal things in her apartment. Were they still there? Since she now knew that distance wasn’t an object, she would go and see. Maybe she could draw enough from what was there to fill her batteries. Or perhaps someone else lived there already. That’s stinkin’ thinkin’ again.
Could she navigate so far in this strange shadow of the world? Would she recognize the landmarks? Would she have to stop at the red lights? That was ludicrous. She could just find it with her god-like super vision. Other than her excursion into space, she had not looked around outside the building. Everything was transparent and in the wild unnamed colors of Neverland. But the shapes were familiar: buildings, roads, trees, and cars. They were familiar enough that, when paired with her flawless recall, she was able to follow the roads to find her apartment.
The apartment was empty, all of her furniture gone. She wasn’t that disappointed, because it was a remote possibility it would still be there. She wondered what had happened to her cat, William Catner. He was a good companion; she hoped someone had adopted him. A memory of sitting in the bay window with her cat got a brief review before it struck her that the built-in seat in the bay window was still there. She had spent a
lot of time there, reading, sketching and watching the sunset. It would still be there and should be full of Millie karma. She got no sense of the energy field emitted by her objects while she scanned the apartment. She would have to visit IRL.
The notion of going so far made her edgy. The spot was burned in her brain now, the memory of her apartment’s location perfect. She didn’t have to follow the route she used to find it; she could zoom straight to it. While looking at her window seat, she willed herself to go there, and she was there in a fraction of a second. Warp factor one, engage! She sensed other people’s essence, presumably the moving crew’s and the painters, already replacing her own. The only significant source left was the window seat. She sucked it dry and flashed back to her cubicle. Her energy stores were filled, but her home no longer hers.
No point lamenting how tenuous her position was. She had already paced back and forth on those thoughts until she’d worn a hole in them. She contemplated her next message. This next one may be the last. Try as she might she could not think of a message brief enough, informative enough, and convincing enough. Words, words, words. Not her strong suit. She considered drawing him a picture since that was her strength. Cosmic Pictionary. Later, she thought, if there is a later. She watched Martin as she moped.
When a line of people formed at the copier between her and Martin, it drew her attention. She began to study their auras as they stood and waited, this one impatient, those glad to be doing nothing for a few minutes. Each one of them stepped up to the copier, placed something on the glass, closed the lid and pressed a few buttons. She zoomed in close to see in detail what happened when they pressed each button. Collating that with her perfect memory of using the machine, she developed a picture of the electrical pulses that occurred when many of the keys were struck. While she observed, they used most of the numbers and the Start button. Duplicating them might be possible by converting her cache of life energy to electricity. The right pulse in the right place would imitate the circuit closing. Great, she could haunt the photocopier. She wasn’t going to try it now, her tiny store of energy too precious at the moment.
Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle Page 4